In conventional sensors in which the image of a scene is focused on the detector plane, rotation or translational movement of the sensor causes the image of the scene to move and distort relative to the detector. Under such conditions, a fixed reference frame in the scene is not a fixed reference frame in the image plane. To compensate for image motion to prevent blur, conventional sensors must sample scene information at very high frame rates. The greater the sensor motion, the higher the frame rate must be with concomitant greater bandwidth requirements.
A major disadvantage of using fast frame rates is that scene frames lose their value quickly since they cannot easily be correlated with new frames having different distortion. Physical stabilization of the sensor line of sight has been attempted with only partial success. Such stabilization corrects for only part of the image motion, the part in the near vicinity of the relative velocity vector or the track point in the scene. This procedure makes the useful field of view small and increasingly smaller at higher relative velocities. Therefore, a need arises for a method and apparatus for stabilizing images in a sampling coordinate frame in a computer to compensate for relative motion between the object and the sensor.